


Need to touch

by TheMouthKing



Series: Bangtoberfest 2K17 [3]
Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Kinktober 2017, M/M, Muscles, Sthenolagnia, Strength, gym buddies, i wanna be dirty, no real smut, sorry fam, toucha toucha toucha touch me, work out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-08 22:53:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12263721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMouthKing/pseuds/TheMouthKing
Summary: Day 3 of Kinktober 2017; Sthenolagnia (Strength/Muscles).





	Need to touch

**Author's Note:**

> Not the best, to be quite honest, but I'm using this month of prompts to push myself to worry less over fic and just post it. These are an exercise in just writing and getting out of my head. So, they're not as polished as some other fics might be. They're just there.

Link knows damn well what he’s doing to him. He’s got to. 

They’ve been working out together for months. Longer than that, but they’ve kicked it into high gear in the last year, the both of them approaching forty and each with their own reasons for wanting to make a change. Rhett wanted to improve his core strength, his doctor having said it would alleviate some of his back pain. Link just wanted muscle mass and tone. He wanted to feel different in his body, wanted to look different in pictures. He didn’t like the pictures of himself from five years ago, how skinny he was back then. Like a beanstalk with legs. 

And make a change he has. They both have, but Link... at first it was subtle but now it’s impossible to ignore no matter how hard Rhett tries to. And he _has_ tried to. For weeks, he’s tried to ignore those broad shoulder as they’ve gained definition, the way the muscles in his back and arms move beneath his skin when he lifts. 

He looks forward to their workouts in a way that feels transparent, like Link has to know, excited for the chance to catch a glimpse of him while he’s working out his upper body. Lately, it’s not so much sneaking glances but outright staring from the short distance away he is, at his own machine or station. More than once, he’s ended up caught gawking, their eyes locked in the mirror, Rhett stuttered in a set. Obvious. 

He’s got to touch them, got to touch Link. He hasn’t felt like this since high school or college, this absolute desperation to touch. A need so deafening that he’s willing to do absolutely anything to satisfy it, no matter how stupid or thinly veiled. It’s where the wrestling came from, the dead move. An excuse to move with Link on the floor, to feel his body pressed tight against his. 

That’s not what he’s looking for now. Not quite, anyways. 

They’re wrapping up in a near-deserted gym and headed for the locker rooms, both of their clothes clinging to their sweaty bodies from their workouts. Rhett hangs back at the last station he was at, slowing around wiping down the bench so that he’s bringing up the rear on the way back to the lockers. So he can walk a few paces behind Link, drink him in. 

Later, he couldn’t say just what it was that was different today. That was the reason he couldn’t just watch and not touch, that he couldn’t keep his distance. Whatever it was -- maybe that he’d pushed himself too far today, thinking that might keep him at arm’s length, keep him from facing this -- it feels easy today to ignore all the reasons why he shouldn’t. 

The motion of Link lifting his arms over his head, peeling his way out of his tank top, is interrupted by a broad hand suddenly and surprisingly moving over his bicep. 

“What the-” Link turns, tangled in his shirt, wrestling it down his arms and gives Rhett a puzzled look. Almost annoyed to find him as close as he is, because he’s hot and sweaty and all he wants is to fish his towel out of his locker and hit the showers, not deal with whatever it is that has Rhett this close and touching him. 

“Sorry,” Rhett says, feels like his mouth has gone dry, tongue thick between his lips making talking feel clunky and difficult. “You just… you look real good.” 

Link’s hard to read, then. Bristly, maybe off-put, and Rhett wishes that instead of apologize he’d just… leaned into the moment. Owned it, pushed the way he’d push in college, by forcing contact to get this burning need to _touch_ out of his system. It feels like he can’t now, like he’s blown the moment. He’s stepping back from Link when he catches a flicker of something pass over his face. Amusement, maybe. Pleasure at the comment, the compliment. Rhett doesn’t miss the way, as he turns, he lets his own hand echo the un-asked for touch, feeling the strength in his own bicep like he doesn’t already know how his body feels.

Rhett’s not even quite cognitively aware of what’s happening before it does, just knows that all of a sudden his hands are back on Link’s body. That he’s crowding him too close to the rows of lockers, fingers curling around the strong upper arms beneath his palms. Rhett can feel his pulse thrum beneath his skin, like his heart is beating in his ears. 

Link rolls his shoulder like he’s trying to throw him off and turns, “Knock it off, man.”

Rhett’s not about to apologize and pull back again. He feels that same stupid, headlong rush he used to, the feeling that pushed him to make stupid decisions, like trying to pin his lanky best friend to the floor of their dorm in their boxers. He stays aggressively in Link’s space, because he knows him. What he wants isn’t to wrestle Link to the floor, but to be wrestled there by him. To get a chance to feel what months of working out has done to that once-familiar body, one he knew how to take down with just a few well-placed holds. 

“You gonna make me?”

Link’s eyes narrow. He regards the taller man with curiosity and disbelief, “The hell are you playing at, man?”

Rhett shoves Link back against the lockers, but his hands linger just a half-beat too long over his now-bare chest, thumb skimming the defined collarbone. Just another excuse to touch him. “Who said I was playing?”

It starts to happen fast, like steps in a practiced dance, like the floor was where they were meant to be. Rhett’s always ended up on top in the past, always been the one to win because he’s had the advantage of size and desperation. Because he’s been the one who wanted it more, who angled for it to end like that. Now? Well, now he doesn’t want to win, but he also doesn’t know if he _would_ anymore. Doesn’t know if he’s still got the advantages that come with sheer size difference in the light of Link’s newly developed strength.

He wants to find out so badly it feels like he can hardly breathe. It devolves into desperate grappling on the locker room floor and at first, Rhett’s got a mind to throw it. To lose intentionally just to get what he’s angling for, but increasingly he realizes that he doesn’t have to. That Link doesn’t need to be allowed to win, that he’s so much stronger than he’d been before that he’s taking the upper hand _easily_. Rhett starts to fight back in earnest now, because the longer he fights the more he gets to touch him. 

“Quit it,” Link snaps, breathing hard and trying to knock Rhett’s hands off of him. 

But their breath isn’t the only thing between them that’s hard. Rhett is and has been, straining at the front of his loose gym shorts, but so is Link. He hadn’t quite been sure until just now, until somehow they’d found themselves in a mirror image of how this used to end. Rhett face down on the floor and Link pressed along the length of his body, half-wrapped around him, holding him down. Rhett’s half-expecting him to rumble that he’s dead against his neck, even though that had always been his move, his joke, just to rub it in that this time, he’d won. 

Rhett’s flushed and breathless beneath him, red cheeks more obvious than the erection trapped against the floor that Link had almost certainly felt. He wishes he’d ended up facing him, so he could still see him, so there was a chance he could steal another feel. Rub his hand over the solid muscle of a bicep or shoulder, feel all that strength under his fingers instead of just being made aware of it by how swiftly he’d been taken down. 

“If I let you up, you gonna keep your hands to yourself?”

“Yeah,” Rhett replies a little belatedly, needing the second or two delay to refill his lungs with air. “I’ll be good, man. Promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for liking, commenting, and subscribing. :)


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